csillagkohó’s Reviews > American Imperatives: The Cold War Reconsidered > Status Update

"When the concept of Mitteleuropa reappeared in the 1980s, it was as a sort of utopian desire on the part of Eastern European intellectuals for the rearticulation of an older cultural unity, designed to eliminate their Eastern heritage and connect them up again with the West. Ironically, when that reconnection did happen, in 1989, Mitteleuropa disappeared again, its space taken over by a culture of hamburger joints."

US wars/military operations "cannot be grasped as the opposite of diplomacy. On the contrary, as the qualitative distinction between war and peace is erased or at least blurred, policing goes beyond simple repression to become a means of political pressure, even a form of diplomacy perhaps."

"I disagree with those left-wing accounts of the cold war that see the need for capitalist expansion as central. The cold war was a political move, a strategic way of putting the US into the world in no uncertain terms ... This is not unrelated to capitalism, but at the same time not reducible to it. An argument could well be made that a better solution for capital in 1947 would have been cooperation with the USSR."

US negotiations with the USSR around 1950 "did of course happen at times, but as John Foster Dulles said in a moment of candor, 'We did not actually desire to enter in negotiation, but felt compelled to do so in order to get our allies to consent to the rearmament of Germany.'"